Monday, 8 December 2014

From New York to Greece, we revolt ‘cus we can’t breathe

“I can’t breathe. I can’t
breathe. I can’t breathe.” Those were Eric Garner’s last words. He repeated
them at least 11 times, clearly audible to the camera that recorded it all, as
one cop sat on his chest and another suffocated him in choke-hold. And then he
stopped moving. For six minutes they just left him lying there on the sidewalk
— they didn’t do a goddamn thing to save his life. The coroner ruled it a
homicide; another black man murdered by a white cop. Yet a white-majority grand
jury chose not to indict him. Now we can’t breathe.

We can’t breathe with
this injustice in the air. We can’t breathe knowing that in America a black man
is killed by police every 28 hours — and the cop usually gets away with
impunity. We can’t breathe witnessing how these pigs maim, terrorize and murder
people of color. How they stifle the peaceful protests in response. How they
arrive in tanks, dressed up like Robocops, carrying solid wooden batons and
fully automatic rifles, looking for any possible excuse to shoot or beat the
shit out of people they’re supposed to “serve and protect.”

We can’t breathe in this
toxic atmosphere of state brutality.

We can’t breathe in this
travesty of justice, this sham of a democracy.

How can we breathe
knowing that, just two bloody weeks ago, the exact same thing happened with the
white cop who shot Mike Brown in Ferguson?

How can we breathe
knowing that, just a day after Garner’s murderer got away scot-free, another
unarmed black man was shot by a white cop in Arizona?

How can we breathe
knowing that the bastards who shot a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy
gun are not even suspected of any wrongdoing?

How can we breathe
knowing that the only person indicted in Eric Garner’s murder was the man who
recorded it on video?!

How can we breathe
through the seething rage, the disbelief — the disgust?

We just can’t fucking
breathe.

And we’re not alone.

It’s the same shit
everywhere.

In Mexico, the cops and
the gangs are one. Still no sign of the 43 missing students of the Escuela
Normal Rural in Ayotzinapa — but everyone knows what happened. The mayor had
the cops turn the students over to the gangs, who let 15 of them suffocate to
death in a truck, then executed the others and incinerated their remains in a
giant fire that burnt all night. Apparently some of the students were still
alive when they were thrown into the flames. The whole political system is in
on it — everyone knows. And so in Mexico, they can’t breathe.

In Greece, the cops and
the fascists are one. Still no resolution to the 25 day hunger strike of the
anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos. Everyone knows what happened. Nikos and his
comrades robbed a bank. They told the bank employees they had nothing to fear;
their enemy was the state. But the cops got to them before they could escape.
They were arrested and subjected to torture, their faces so badly bruised the
cops had to overtly photoshop the mugshots released to the press. Oh, and today
it was exactly six years ago that a cop shot Nikos’ best friend Alexis through
the heart — in cold blood — right in front of his eyes.

Now Nikos is on hunger
strike because the state refused to grant him his constitutional right to
attend university classes outside of prison. He stopped eating, he declared, to
gain “a breath of freedom.” But instead of granting him a gasp of air, the
state is simply letting him starve to death. “Even if God himself came down
from the skies,” the Justice Minister declared, “I would not grant him a
leave.” Now doctors warn that Nikos is in critical condition and could succumb
to organ failure anytime. His parents fear that their son will end up a martyr.
But the cops simply respond to solidarity protests with more teargas. And so in
Greece, like in Mexico and the US, they can’t breathe.

I could go on. I could
talk about the coldblooded execution of a Palestinian man by Israeli police
last month. I could talk about the police murder of the environmental activist
Rémi Fraisse in France. I could talk about police violence against Occupy
protesters in Hong Kong. I could talk about Brazilian police killing six people
a day. I could talk about the police impunity following the Marikana massacre
in South Africa. I could talk about LAPD officers shooting a man in the head
today — ten fucking times! — amid a crowd of tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. I
could talk about the Turkish cops who killed a Kurdish youth in a protest
today. I could talk about the epidemic of police violence and harassment
against transgender people of color. I could go on and on and on.

But there is no point to
write and talk and analyze and debate. Some things are so basic, so elementary,
so simple and straightforward that they simply cannot stand: not in the US, not
in Mexico, not in Greece, not in Palestine, not in France, not in Hong Kong,
not in Brazil, not in South Africa, not in Kurdistan, nowhere. Because like
this we cannot breathe — and in the universal sense of suffocation we feel at
the hands of the capitalist state and its forces of order, we are one. Some of
us are greatly privileged, to be sure, but our enemy is one and the same. From
New York to Greece, we must revolt against the police. As the great Franz Fanon
so astutely put it, “when we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We
revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.